13th: An Exploration of Mass Incarceration in the U.S

One of the most eye-opening and thought-provoking films I’ve had the pleasure to see is being shown later this month at an upcoming Humanities House event as part of the Humanities House Spring 2017 “Politics and Popcorn” film series: “13th”. This compelling documentary by Ava DuVernay investigates the issue of mass incarceration in America, attempting to determine why we only have 5% of the world’s population, yet house 25% of its prisoners. In order to answer this question, and explore the impact this has had on minority communities in particular, DuVernay sets the beginning of her film in 1865 with the passing of the Thirteenth Amendment, which outlawed slavery in the United States.

However, DuVernay highlights a clause in the Thirteenth Amendment that gets brought up over and over again throughout the film - the Thirteenth Amendment prohibits slavery except as punishment for a crime. When this was initially ratified, many were unwilling to give up the slave labor that not only fueled their economy, but was a part of their way of life. In order to work around the Thirteenth Amendment, black people began to be convicted of crimes at the drop of a hat, arrested instantly for crimes as minor as loitering. Through the exploitation of this clause, law enforcement made it clear that the Thirteenth Amendment had not ended slavery, and that those in positions of authority could still act upon their biases under the guise of a “justifiable cause”.

DuVernay continues her story through the next few decades as the Jim Crow laws are ratified, implementing strict segregation laws in the South (though segregation was legal in many northern states as well). During this time, though slavery was illegal, black people were still treated as sub-human in every respect. Not only did policies such as the Jim Crow laws delegate them as 2nd class citizens, but violent, horrific crimes such as lynching plagued communities all over the country. Those who committed these crimes often pointed to their victims, claiming that they were participating in “criminal” behavior or “looked suspicious”. This was an effective strategy for those who wanted to keep them as 2nd class citizens, as when people begin to view a group as “criminals”, it is easy to dismiss, exile, and dehumanize them.

This idea of labeling people as “criminals” as a way to dismiss and dehumanize them continues throughout the documentary as it follows Nixon’s presidency and his “War on Drugs”. During his presidency, Richard Nixon declared a “War on Drugs” in an attempt to combat drug addiction, pushing laws such as mandatory sentencing and no-knock warrants. This drastically increased not only the number of arrests, but the sentence of those who were arrested. Nixon’s classification of drugs as “public enemy #1” skyrocketed the number of incarcerated people in the U.S from 350,000 to 500,000 in just 10 years.

DuVernay makes the claim that Nixon’s “War on Drugs” was just a way to indirectly target the black community, as law enforcement could use this new initiative as a way to stop protests from the Civil Rights Movement by claiming “criminal activity” from a group of people already painted to look like criminals. Politically, it was meant to appeal to people who were not comfortable with the Civil Rights Movement and did not want to see the social change associated with it.

To be honest, when this was first proposed in the documentary, I was skeptical. As someone who didn’t grow up in the 70’s and didn’t have its cultural context when examining Nixon’s “War on Drugs”, it just seemed like a heavy-handed an ineffective way of dealing with drug addiction that, unfortunately, disproportionately affected minority communities during the 70’s and 80’s. However, John Ehrlichmen, one of Nixon’s advisors, released a statement after he was out of office that revealed the political reasoning behind the “War on Drugs”:

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities … We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

For me, this was the turning point of the documentary. This statement from Ehrlichmen is one of the more explicit and compelling pieces of evidence in DuVernay’s documentary, setting up the rest of the film to explore how political power has been - and still is - wielded to exploit racial bias. I would highly recommend going to see this documentary at the next Humanities House event, especially considering its relevance in today’s political climate. The topics of police brutality and racism are often explored in the media, but DuVernay provides a refreshing historical context that gives insight as to how these attitudes emerged and therefore what we can do to stop them.